Like many children of the VHS era, I grew up rewinding the Star Wars trilogy box set, its paper casing worn and ripped after endless slumber parties and sick days. And then came 1997. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Star Wars, George Lucas, the visionary behind the sci-fi juggernaut, released a re-edited version of the saga, this time replacing hand-puppeted alien life-forms with CGI, and changing character beats so that once-dubious antiheroes would play off as morally superior.
I felt violated. Is that what it was like when they made cuts to the Old Testament? What did it mean that an extant artistic statement could be picked up, ripped apart, and rearranged on a whim, long after it had been released into the cultural imagination? Was the original Star Wars, which I and my brothers grew up with, lesser, outdated, undone? Could an artist walk into a museum and edit his work, even after it had been displayed permanently?
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